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A Conversation with Joe Henry (continued)
JH: And I started thinking more and more that the songs needed to, at least thematically, be a lot more aggressive, have a lot more going on. And I wanted it to be a lot more raw than Scar was. So I started putting this idea together of how to assemble a particular kind of quote, unquote, orchestra to record live in a studio, so you get all that collision of events.
I'm really a big fan of take two and three, when people are--they're starting to know the song well enough that they have confidence in what they're playing and they've got an idea they're really going to air out. But nobody's really thinking of it yet as, like, a take. Everybody is still just kind of tearing it apart.
PM: "Hey, we're still running it down."
JH: Yeah. And there's a particular moment where you've gone beyond people like learning the song and beyond where everybody starts to get careful and getting out of each other's way, where they start hearing a few play backs and say, "Well, hey, now that I hear you're doing that in the first refrain, I'll clear that out for you." Everybody is just kind of going.
And I decided that that was really what was going to be appropriate for this record, just a certain type of explosion, a certain amount of chaos. I don't know how else to say that.
PM: Yeah.
JH: That's just how it occurred to me. So I started putting together an idea of how to have an orchestra of a certain sort, but still of manageable size.
PM: Right.
JH: Through Don I met Ron Miles, the trumpet player who's worked with Don on a number of things. And I got a lot more than I bargained for there, because I tapped into the beautiful synergy they have because of their working relationship.
PM: Yeah, you can really hear that they've worked together.
JH: And they're just arranging together on the fly! Between takes, they start quickly making notes for themselves, to play melodies together, who's going to start playing a pad and who's going to go off.
PM: Yeah, they're like the jazz version of the Memphis horns, those two.
JH: Exactly. I didn't want it to be an anonymous horn section. I was listening a lot to The Harder They Fall soundtrack, and how often there are just the two horns, and you still hear them as individual voices. You get four horns and it becomes a blur of a section. You add a third part, then harmony becomes a lot more restricting. But two horns can be up against each other in a really different way.
PM: It's so much more raw, two horns.
JH: Yes. So the idea was, I was really developing a great communication with my touring band of that last year--David Palmer, the piano player, Jay Bellerose, the drummer, Jennifer Condos was the bass player. Chris Bruce, who is one of my favorite musicians, is the guitar player. And I've worked with him some off the road, but I'd never really recorded with him. So I brought him in, because I knew that he's got just a beautiful sense of what's needed--he comes up with beautiful parts. He's got great chops, but he doesn't play like anybody who plays as well as he does.
PM: I didn't know him before this record. Is he an L.A. or New York guy?
JH: He's in L.A. now. He's from Chicago. He used to tour with Wendy & Lisa when he was very young. He's toured with Seal a lot--he's got a very interesting background. But we met and became really fast friends, kind of bonded over our mutual love for Sly.
PM: Oh yeah.
JH: He kind of comes from that world. And he's got a beautiful sensibility, great melodic sense, just beautiful parts.
PM: Right.
JH: And then Patrick Warren, who I've known but never worked with--but I knew that if I put David Palmer as the keyboard player and Patrick Warren in the same room, and they've got all these samples and upright piano and organ and Wurlitzer and Chamberlain between them, that in a live situation, there's quite a large kind of orchestral sonic palette that's available. So that became the cast.
And I thought again, "One day we're all going to show up, and we'll see what it sounds like. I think I know, but I don't really know, but I think it'll be interesting." But unlike Scar, I didn't give anybody any fleshed out demos at all. I gave them only acoustic guitar and vocal demos or piano and vocal demos. It had been beneficial with Scar because people referenced the melodic ideas that I built in the strings, and everything on the Scar demos that were very developed. But I didn't want anybody having any preconceived notion about what this was supposed to be. I just gave them these skeletons. And people think I'm joking when I've said this before, but I said, "Here are the songs. And there's this particular Luis Bunuel film I'd like you to see. And then we'll be ready to go."
PM: [laughs] The Criminal Life of Archibald de la Cruz.
JH: Right. And everybody showed up and I think the very first song we did is the first song on the record. And I think we played it three times. And again, we were still getting sounds and levels and balance with everybody. But it was really clear that everybody just jumped in with the completely right spirit and it had the right kind of chaos, thanks in no small part to Don Byron and Dave Palmer, who were both, in their own way, very much the loose cannons.
PM: Really? Oh, that's interesting info, yeah. They just kind of exploded into the scene.
JH: They did.
PM: Wow.
JH: I mean, if you want Don Byron to blow something up, you don't have to tell him twice.
PM: [laughs]
JH: That's just--
PM: "Get in there and make a mess."
JH: Yeah. I think he understood from the get-go, without even talking about it a lot, what his job was, why I had called him.
PM: [laughs]
JH: But it's funny, because a lot of people tend to think of Tiny Voices as just Scar part two, because they hear a strong influence of a jazz tonality in the instrumentation. But I hear them as such completely different animals.
PM: Oh, yeah. I mean, if you like jazz, they're totally different animals. To me, I really felt like I was sitting in the room for Tiny Voices. It was much more like I was there.
JH: Well, that was the idea of having that excitement of a live take. And also that there's nothing sacred about it. I mean, we had the benefit of these live takes, and then the engineer and I, when everybody went home, we dumped a lot of it into Protools and cut stuff up and treated it and flew it back in. I didn't treat anything with any reverence, nothing like, "That's the kind of sound that Don likes for his clarinet." I couldn't have given a shit.
PM: [laughs]
JH: And we'd run it through an amp and process it in all kinds of ways. I told the engineer before we recorded, "We're going to get the excitement, and the songs are going to be arranged out of the chaos of this live experiment. But then, once everybody goes home, we will not revere the live element, we'll not treat it like, 'Hey this was recorded live in a room.' That's not a badge of courage. This is just the best way I know to get this as a resource on the tape."
PM: And that's where [engineer/mixer] Husky Hoskulds' genius comes in.
JH: Right. He's a very unique character. And he was as important as anybody in the room, as far as what it became sonically. We just started treating things, take the drum track and run a mono signal. Husky has all kind of things he does when he mixes that are unique to him. Just as an example, where he would take--I don't know if you've heard the Solomon Burke record that I produced. Have you heard that record?
PM: Sure.
JH: I produced that, and Husky was the engineer on it, and a number of the same musicians, Chris Bruce on guitar, Dave Palmer on piano, Jay Bellerose on drums.
PM: Right.
JH: But the idea of taking the women singing backup on a couple of songs on Tiny Voices, and running it through an amp, and re-miking it using a Victrola horn with a microphone at the tulip end of it, the tiny end of the Victrola horn, so you're doing in reverse what a Victrola does. Instead of taking a tiny signal and projecting it out. You're taking a broad sound--
PM: [laughs] And sucking it down.
JH: In an analog sort of way, you're compressing it into a sonically tiny space, but the whole tonal spectrum of the original sound, the whole character of the voice, is there. continue
